


As It Was (Crystal Heart Mix)

by Anonymous



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-12
Updated: 2019-03-12
Packaged: 2019-11-15 22:24:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18082055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Whatever here that's left of me / Is yours just as it was / Just as it was, baby / Before the otherness cameOr: from the beginning, on the divine and falling apart. Creation in breaking to pieces.





	As It Was (Crystal Heart Mix)

Before it starts, They are one. They have no beat in their soul that the other does not feel, that the other does not take pride from. Before there is time, before there is even enough to call an aetherial sea, it is the purest joy to just be. 

They stay together then. There is so little, and the other may well be the world entire- the soul entire- the rise to the fall of their own breath, inasmuch as there is breath. In small distinctions, in small differences growing louder, do they start to lay their claims. Yours as opposed to mine. And yet, if They are honest with Themselves, there is always a soft ‘and yours again’.

Light to dark. The pulse of life to the breath of magic. Space to time, and this He relishes as all the better to savor and twine with what She creates, wan sparks grown unfathomably bright then cold and still. It is disquieting, that anything could end, would end, at his touch and his care. The lifeless wisps held close to crystalline cores before they dissipate back into the sea neither of them can quite lay claim to.

Their first solution, jointly taken as it should be, withers and blooms. Death clings to it, its breath ragged with rot even as every single heartbeat rings with life. It is and it is not, half adrift in the sea, and its beauty is terrible to behold.

There is no joy in casting it out. It is not that They did not love their child- his heart stained black as the depths of the aether, and hers in boundless radiance promising her lost a way back to her in change- but in that twilight being They found pain in love, in opposites meant not to be held so intimately.

Looking back, Hydaelyn thinks that She should have known then. 

Her second, as She is light and life and warmth, is to keep creation in her grasp. There is pain, yes- They cannot excise it now, twined as it is into their soul- but it is tempered by her love, by the slow deliverance into his realm. For all the gloom in Zodiark’s heart, He cannot help but to receive of her, radiance briefly bursting in the depths of the dark, warmth blooming in the silent distance between stars. When they dim, He releases them, that She may grant them new form and soul, new respite from the loneliness. They weigh little without Hydaelyn’s gifts, scattering motes that just as easily leave his grasp as pour in.

But weigh they do.

And it is then that He takes a third solution, as slow as time can be. Shards of souls weigh little, feel less; Hydaelyn does not miss them, when the tides of the sea return to her, and in the abyss Zodiark can work without her notice.

He presents a child, passably in the image of the beings Hydaelyn weaves from her heart, tinted with his soul. There is no shadow in their form, just as there is no light; in their absence, the child takes. There is joy in the taking, as there is sorrow in the loss of the gloom, as there is pain in her heart.

Her fourth, meant to bring balance, is a wisp of herself. Twining with the scion of the dark, there is fulfillment. Zodiark is more distant now, yet Hydaelyn knows him to take notice, to live vicariously through his creation. By his will, there is some form of ceasefire, his focus singularly on prolonging sweetly stolen time. She steals as He has stolen from her, and in blinding radiance both shards cease to be. There is a different form of pain now, Hydaelyn thinks, retrieving what She can of her creation. It worsens when She sees the depth of what her opposite has wrought, harshly finding his own scion in the murk. It is passably in her image, deathless and empty but for the dark. The creature lingers at the edge of the aetherial sea, beneath the cover of benighted wings.

She cannot bring back her own child as such, only the brilliant shard of crystal at their heart. So She summons again, commands them to set to rights as Zodiark’s scion seeks to bring her light to the deepest part of darkness. They cannot bear the light, shorn as they are from what They once were; Hydaelyn cannot love this, bitterness settling deep at her core. There was not enough, there was too much. Again and again, their soul-shards meet and clash.

The last thing She does is banishment, when She can but pick up the pieces of her latest child and her counterpart breaks himself- breaks her- apart to rejoin his piece by piece. She knows the small losses now, woven into the dark-child’s form from the ash of her lights; She knows the worse losses now, bits of herself fading into the gloom, into a hungry not-quite-heart.

It is more in the end, her heart and thirteen pieces, scatterings of crystal dust. But if She is in thirteen, then He is in only one, crumpled and held tight to her chest as She frets. Hydaelyn knows not what to do- knows what to do, but still can’t bear it- and in the end, She casts him away.

Not far enough. The moon is taunting, longing, almost but not quite within Hydaelyn’s reach. She resolves not to, death slow if hers to give. First, she tends to life.

Upon a shard, she layers the crystal dust from her soul, binding it to creatures, and when they name the world after her she smiles.


End file.
